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Good morning.
The Daily Trend Report. Every weekday morning, giovanni gallucci and a rotating cohost (Chloe Dawn on clean label food and beverage, plus Rachel Donovan or Alexis Parker on social media) synthesize the day's cross-LLM trend reports into three operator stories: social media, clean label food and beverage, and content, social, and AI. Tight, specific, no filler. For owners, founders, marketing leads, and operators in clean-label CPG.
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| ai-assisted content
alexis parker: Good morning. This is Alexis Parker, sitting in with giovanni gallucci and Chloe Dawn, and this is the Daily Trend Report.
giovanni gallucci: Morning, Alexis. Morning, Chloe.
alexis parker: Ruby had me out past the water tower at five-thirty. I've decided she runs this household.
chloe dawn: I've got a can of Crazy Water sitting next to me I opened an hour ago and haven't touched. It fits today, I promise.
giovanni gallucci: Today we've got a study about who people trust, a spring water that grew on word of mouth, and a beverage brand that ran its whole Halloween contest in the comments.
alexis parker: Kendall put this one in front of me, and Travis had it too. Wondery and SmithGeiger surveyed three thousand American fans, eighteen to sixty-four, about the creators they follow. MediaPost wrote it up yesterday. Eighty-five percent say their favorite creator feels like a friend.
chloe dawn: Friend is a strong word for somebody you've never met.
alexis parker: It gets stronger. Of those people, eighty-one percent trust that creator at least as much as their actual close friends. And seventy-one percent trust their favorite creator over social influencers.
giovanni gallucci: Hold on. Who did they count as a creator?
alexis parker: That's the part people skip. The study means the host of an episodic program. Somebody with a weekly show, a podcast, a recurring YouTube series. Not the account that posts a different brand every Tuesday.
giovanni gallucci: Then that's the whole story right there, and most of the coverage is going to miss it.
alexis parker: The headline everybody is running is "creators are trusted more than ever."
giovanni gallucci: And the lazy read of that headline is, great, buy more creator posts. Which is backwards. Read the next number.
alexis parker: Fifty percent of fans assume a creator doesn't actually like a brand they only mention once.
chloe dawn: Half? Half of them hear a single mention and assume it's a paycheck?
giovanni gallucci: Half. So the one-off sponsored post, the exact thing most brands buy, is the exact thing the audience has learned to discount. Seventy-one percent said repeat presence across episodes is what reads as a real endorsement. Trust doesn't come from reach. It comes from showing up on a schedule.
alexis parker: And Marketing Dive ran the other half the same day. In the ANA's survey, two thirds of marketers say measurement is the hardest part of influencer work. So brands can't prove what a post did, and now we know fans don't believe the post anyway.
chloe dawn: So what's a small brand supposed to do? A regional coffee roaster can't afford a podcast host for a year.
giovanni gallucci: Sure it can. It just has to be the host. Here's where I'd go with this. The trust in that study isn't attached to a famous person. It's attached to a format. A person, a day of the week, a recurring thing you come back for. Nobody is stopping a brand from being that.
alexis parker: So you mean the brand runs its own show. Not a campaign, a show.
giovanni gallucci: A show. One person who works there, the same person every time. Same day, same time, same first line. Ten episodes before anybody looks at a single number. It can be ninety seconds on Reels. It can be a TikTok LIVE every Thursday night. TikTok says its US LIVE Shopping sales more than doubled in the first half of this year, and the brands winning there aren't doing one big stunt. They're running a slot.
chloe dawn: What goes in the show, though? Ten episodes is a lot of ideas.
giovanni gallucci: It's fewer than you think, because the show isn't about the product. The roaster does what's in the cup this week. The salsa company does what's on the stove at the plant. The product shows up the way it shows up on a host's desk. It's there, it's used, it gets mentioned in passing in episode three and again in episode seven. That's the repeat presence the study is talking about.
alexis parker: One wrinkle. Instagram is pulling the feature that links Reels together as a series. It goes away October 28th.
giovanni gallucci: Good. Then don't build your show on a feature they can take back. Make the series obvious without it. Same cover frame on every episode, the episode number in the first line of the caption, and one pinned post that lists every episode in order. You own that. They can't switch it off in an update.
chloe dawn: And what if the first three episodes get forty views?
giovanni gallucci: They probably will. That's normal, and it's the part where most brands quit. The study is about people who came back. Nobody comes back to episode one. You're building the thing they come back to.
alexis parker: And the measurement problem kind of solves itself.
giovanni gallucci: Mostly. You stop asking whether one post worked. You ask whether episode eight beat episode one. If it did, people are coming back, and coming back is the whole trust mechanism.
alexis parker: So the answer to "creators are trusted" is "become one." Very convenient for a guy with a microphone.
giovanni gallucci: I didn't run the survey.
giovanni gallucci: Three things you can actually do today.
giovanni gallucci: One. Pick a day and a time, give the show a plain name, and commit to ten episodes before you look at any numbers.
chloe dawn: Two. Use the same host from inside the brand every time, opening with the same first line, so a scroller knows in one second whose show it is.
alexis parker: Three. Judge the run from the back half. Compare episodes eight through ten against one through three, not against your best Reel.
chloe dawn: Eddie flagged this, and honestly every report this morning had it. On Wednesday, Primo Brands opened a new plant in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for The Mountain Valley. Spring water, out of the Ouachita Mountains, bottled there since 1871. About two hundred thousand square feet, three new lines.
alexis parker: The green glass bottle. I see that bottle in every café in Marfa.
chloe dawn: That's the one. And here's the line that got me. The company says the demand growth is primarily from word of mouth. Not a campaign. People telling people.
giovanni gallucci: Before we get misty about it, who's saying that?
chloe dawn: The owner. Primo Brands, the big consolidated bottler from the 2024 merger. So yes, a public company issued a press release saying its growth was organic and heartfelt. I've read that release before. Every company writes it.
giovanni gallucci: Fair. And I'll give them the other half, because it matters. That's an American plant, built at an American source, for a product with one ingredient. That's the kind of manufacturing story this show likes, even if the heritage now reports to shareholders.
chloe dawn: Both things are true. A hundred and fifty-five years of a family-feeling brand, and now it's a line item.
giovanni gallucci: So take the press release with a grain of salt and look at the product instead. One spring. One year everybody can say out loud. A bottle you recognize across a room. Nobody needed a clever campaign to pass that along.
alexis parker: The dumb version of this story is "word of mouth is luck." Some brands get it, some don't.
giovanni gallucci: Right, and that's the one I want to kill this morning. Word of mouth isn't luck. Word of mouth runs on a sentence. "It's been bottled in Arkansas since 1871" is a sentence. A person can say that at a dinner table without sounding like an ad. "Premium hydration for modern lifestyles" isn't a sentence anybody has ever said to a friend.
chloe dawn: Which brings me to my can. I didn't buy my first Crazy Water. A friend handed me one in Fort Davis and said, it's from Mineral Wells, it's the water people used to take the train for. That's the whole pitch. I've been buying it for two years.
giovanni gallucci: And notice you didn't say anything their marketing team wrote.
chloe dawn: I don't know what their marketing team wrote.
giovanni gallucci: That's the point. Here's where a small brand gets this wrong. They write their own sentence in a conference room and spend a year trying to make customers repeat it. Backwards. Your customers already have a sentence for you. It's sitting in your DMs, your tags, your reviews. The way they describe you to a friend is the copy. Your job is to go find it and hand it back to them.
alexis parker: And then what? You found the sentence. Now what?
giovanni gallucci: Then you find the people saying it. Every brand has twenty or thirty customers doing its selling for free. They tag you. They bring you up in other people's comments. Most brands treat them like a nice surprise. I'd treat them like the sales team. Put them in front of everybody, by name, on a schedule.
chloe dawn: Without paying them.
giovanni gallucci: Without paying them. Credit is the currency. A regular who sees her post on your feed with her name on it tells six more people that week. That's the word of mouth Mountain Valley's press release is bragging about, except you can actually do it on purpose.
alexis parker: What if the sentence people use isn't the one you want? Like everybody says it's the cheap one.
giovanni gallucci: Then you just learned something your last brand survey didn't tell you. Don't fight it on day one. Find the second most common sentence and see if it's closer to where you want to go. Usually there's one about taste, or where it is from, or who handed it to them. That's the one you put up front.
chloe dawn: And if nobody's tagging you at all?
giovanni gallucci: Then go read the comments on other people's posts in your category. Your customers are describing what they want out loud, every day, for free. Start there.
alexis parker: It also gives you a week of content you didn't have to shoot.
giovanni gallucci: Which nobody hates.
giovanni gallucci: Three moves before the coffee gets cold.
giovanni gallucci: One. Search your tagged posts, DMs, and reviews for how people describe you to a friend, and write down the exact words, typos and all.
chloe dawn: Two. Make the most common one the first line of your bio and your pinned post, in their words, not yours.
alexis parker: Three. Find the twenty accounts that tag you most and repost one every Friday, credited by name, with their sentence as the caption.
giovanni gallucci: Eddie brought me this one, and it's the best contest mechanic I've seen this month. Herb Light is a Chicago drink, a lager-style beverage with one milligram of THC. For Halloween, they're giving away a stay in a reportedly haunted house in Illinois, stocked fridge included.
alexis parker: I love a haunted Airbnb.
giovanni gallucci: Here's the part that matters. To enter, you leave your worst cannabis horror story in the comments of their Instagram post. Or you DM it. That's it. No hashtag. No tag three friends. A story.
chloe dawn: And compare that to Twix. Twix runs its Hallowmas contest every year, and this year the official rules say your entry doesn't have to be posted on social at all.
giovanni gallucci: Which is a wonderful way to spend a social budget on a contest that never touches your social account.
alexis parker: OK, but why does the story part matter so much? A comment is a comment.
giovanni gallucci: No, it isn't. A "tag three friends" comment is three names nobody reads. A story is something other people stop and read. Somebody scrolls past, sees forty strangers telling the worst thing that ever happened to them at a party, and they stay. Now the post is the show. And every one of those comments lives on your post, which is the signal Instagram actually ranks on.
chloe dawn: Plus the DMs. Every one of those is a private conversation they own now.
giovanni gallucci: Right. A hashtag contest sends everybody off to their own page. This keeps everybody in your house.
alexis parker: What about bots? Every comment giveaway I've ever run got flooded.
giovanni gallucci: That's the other thing the story does. A bot can type "great product, pick me." It can't write a decent paragraph about the night it ate a whole bag of gummy worms and hid in a closet. The prompt is the filter.
chloe dawn: OK, but a THC drink can get away with horror stories. What does a granola brand ask for?
giovanni gallucci: Same mechanic, your category. The worst road trip snack you ever ate. The first thing you ever cooked for somebody you were trying to impress. The dumbest thing you ever did at a campsite. Make it specific enough that people have an answer ready, and funny enough they want to tell it.
alexis parker: And the prize?
giovanni gallucci: A place, not a gift card. Herb Light didn't give away a hundred bucks. They gave away a night somewhere strange. Nobody posts about a gift card. People post about a weekend. A small brand can do a cabin, a table at a local spot, a day on somebody's ranch. Tie it to the story.
chloe dawn: Timing matters here too. Halloween is two weeks out.
giovanni gallucci: Which is plenty. Herb Light posted on the twelfth. If you open a story contest Monday and close it on the thirtieth, you're live while the whole feed is talking about the same night. Keep the window short. Two weeks of entries is a contest. Two months is a chore.
alexis parker: And somebody has to actually read all of them.
giovanni gallucci: Somebody does, and it's the most useful hour of the month. Every entry tells you how your customers talk, what they think is funny, where they were when it happened. That's a free focus group, and it beats any survey you'd pay for.
alexis parker: So what's the one I shouldn't copy this week?
giovanni gallucci: Wendy's. They signed on as the first sponsor of Peacock's new swipe feed, Your Bravoverse, where an AI version of Andy Cohen can say the sponsor's name out loud. It's new, it's expensive, and nobody has shown a single viewer likes hearing a fake host read an ad.
chloe dawn: It's the opposite of what we just said in the first segment. A real host, earned trust, versus a rented voice.
giovanni gallucci: Exactly. Wendy's bought a likeness. Herb Light bought a haunted house for a weekend and asked its own followers to tell stories on its own post. One of those scales down to a four-person brand. The other one doesn't scale down to anybody.
alexis parker: And the real payoff is after the contest closes.
giovanni gallucci: That's the best part. You've got a pile of stories. Pick the five best, and answer each one with a video reply to that comment. Now the contest has fed you a week of posts, and every one of them stars a customer.
giovanni gallucci: Three things from this one, then we're done.
giovanni gallucci: One. Kill the tag-three-friends giveaway. Next time, the entry is a story in the comments, with one specific prompt.
chloe dawn: Two. Make the prize a place, a night, a seat, a day somewhere. Not a gift card nobody remembers.
alexis parker: Three. Pick five entries and answer each with a video reply to the comment, so the contest feeds you a week of posts.
giovanni gallucci: Most food and beverage brands I talk to already know what they should be posting. The problem is nobody has time to make it. So the feed sits there with good intentions and no footage. That's what I do. Short-form video, photography, carousels, made every week, built for your brand. I've been doing social media in food and beverage for over fifteen years. Tomorrow it's the Weekend Trend Report, and Sunday it's the Week Ahead. Find me at gallucci dot net or DM at gallucciNET on Instagram or LinkedIn. Have a good weekend.